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The Treasury Verdict long view

Oct 21st 2013 |

Treasury Verdict is the electronic voting and panel discussion held at EuroFinance events worldwide. This report is based on the votes of corporate treasury professionals, bankers and other vendors and advisers who attended EuroFinance’s 22nd annual conference on International Cash & Treasury Management, held in Barcelona, Spain, on 16 to 18 October 2013.

Corporates in Europe are still not ready for SEPA. Only 8% of the treasury and financial professionals polled are currently completely prepared to use SEPA direct debits. [Question 5]

Half of the financial professionals polled said they are not yet ready to use SEPA payments, including for payroll, although they expect to be ready by the 1 February 2014 deadline. Fourteen per cent of the audience are already fully compliant and prepared to use SEPA payments. [Question 4]

Optimism cut with caution sums up the outlook of almost three-quarters of international treasury and finance professionals. Only 26% said they felt less confident about their business prospects this year compared to last year, while 39% do feel more confident and 35% said they feel the same. A significantly higher portion – 46% – feel more confident about the global economic prospects than they did a year ago. [Questions 1&2]

Bad news for banks as 39% of corporate financial professionals said they will be decreasing their number of relationship banks, while 37% said they will stay the same. [Question 3]

Electronic bank account management (eBAM) products have a long way to go to win corporate confidence. While 52% of financial professionals said they want to implement eBAM, the current options don’t meet their needs (28%) or they are not being offered eBAM (24%). [Question 11]